Michael*

The studio certainly entered the big leagues with Witcher 3, unfortunately Cyberpunk has proved that they're too big to be small and too small to be big. It's hard not to feel for some of the talented people behind the scenes who probably would have fought tooth and nail to get the game off the ground, only to have to watch as management overhyped it and promised things that there were simply no time or resources to implement. There probably will come a point where the game is ironed out just enough to be a decent experience on PC and next gen consoles, but I think the interesting unknown in this is exactly what it's going to take to persuade Sony and Microsoft to relist it. Will they have demanded decent performance, or simply something that doesn't crash.

For me two or three things stand out above everything else, I think rising house prices, although that doesn't directly affect living costs for everyone, but the difficulty a lot of people face in buying property has caused rent to go astronomical, especially in your classic hotspot cities. Privatisation and selling anything that isn't nailed down has been a big factor as well, with rising prices in petrol and water imposed by private companies who obviously want to make higher profits, and falling prices of things like oil and petrol often not being passed on particularly quickly to consumers. Transport is also rather more expensive than in most countries, the cost of running a car is sky high, as is public transport for anything other than short hops.

You're in the right place at the right time. Would you mind linking me to the post in question?

It sounds like Thursday 18th March will be the date to mark in your diaries. Not mine though, HBO Max isn't a thing in the UK.

It's been getting progressively worse for some time. People are still suffering, although the problem isn't just that wages are too low, but that the cost of living is ridiculously high. Wage stagnation has been driven by Tory austerity policies, which in turn has been used as an excuse to allow deregulation, and no doubt Brexit will be used as another excuse to take that process further, with pay and employee rights being reduced even more. Not one serious economist still believes in "trickle down," but unfortunately due to low taxation and the consequent lack of sufficient investment in education and basic maths we still have some right-wing economic retrogrades who try to defend it. It's time to call it what it is, a failed experiment.

There have always been arguments and counter-arguments that higher wages lead to unemployment or that higher retirement income will drive wages down. I get both, but even without those things we still have record unemployment, severely curtailed pay and far less job security. Not to mention underpayment of the existing minimum wage, which is also something that many businesses seem to feel they should be able to get away with. It's the worst of all worlds and it's depressing everywhere you look. Overall what it comes down to for me is whether or not stagnant wages will make goods unaffordable, because the cost of living has spiralled out of control. They're all just numbers really, relativity is the lever that creates poverty.

Oh my yes. Time and again, I hear small business owners say they would go down the pan if they had to pay workers even slightly more, simply unaware that the reason their businesses are so close to death is because so few people have disposable income. A healthier minimum wage would be vastly better for the economy. The morality of paying people what they're worth doesn't even need to come into it (although the fact that it doesn't is another absurdity). Plus the fact that if your margins are genuinely so small that you're barely able to take a wage, you might as well just be doing a minimum wage job anyway.

Provided film releases are still a thing by 2023, Anya Taylor-Joy as a young Furiosa in the forthcoming Mad Max prequel is something I'll be very curiosa (sorry) to see.

Hey man, yeah, I'm not sure if we'll ever reach a point where it's altogether comprehensive, but the plan is to make it as accurate as possible. If you know of any that are missing, please do feel free to give me a heads up, I'll be happy to update it.

Thanks everyone, keep watching the skies. 🎿

That's a relief, because if I'd said something really silly, I apparently would have had to consider pivoting to being angry at the people who called me out for it.

WandaVision has been ever so tense to navigate so far and all the better for it, of course. I appreciate that while a lot of the MCU stuff tends to reward the viewer for keeping up with the continuity, this one seems to hold that knowledge over you and I've absolutely no idea where it's headed, which is great. A back burner observation until we get a few episodes deeper, but what I really like (other than just the fact that it's very good) is that I'm clueless as to who might be behind the situation they're in. The tech they showed at the end of the first two episodes looked decidedly human and somewhat unlikely to be anything as insane as Dormamu, Mephisto or Cthon. For what it's worth though, I do prefer the idea of Dormamu being involved. You could tie it into the time stone being destroyed and Strange being unable to uphold his bargain.

Sure, but unfortunately because people have very low standards, they tend to listen to celebrities more than experts, and it sort of puts the former in the awkward position of having to have high standards. And yeah, of course, while they are just ordinary people, they need to be held accountable if they're spreading legitimately dangerous misinformation to fans. Unless somehow we undergo a miraculous societal change where we stop caring as much about what celebrities have to say, they have a responsibility not to say silly things.

Classic "surprising but not really surprising" scenario. People saying Lampard was the embodiment of Chelsea (which is a bit harsh), although I suspect he only took the job because he believed that the transfer embargo would offer some cushioning, if not a completely free hit, in his first season at the club. This year, it was only to be expected that he'd be judged by Abramovich's usual standards and clearly, shuffling all those new players together proved too much for a man with few managerial achievements ("this one time in the Championship I beat Marcelo Bielsa" doesn't count) to his name. As for Tuchel, while Newcastle fans will be incredulous that Roman has nabbed someone off their next manager wishlist, I should think that the British media will have a very understated, rational response to an overhyped Englishman being replaced by a successful German with a top class track record.

I would even admit to finding The Next Generation somewhat underwhelming really, so the subsequent stuff would likely be a bit lost on me anyway. There are elements of TNG that I like and I enjoy some of the individual episodes, but as an ongoing thing it just never really made much of an impression on me. Not sure why.

Yeah, without wishing to derail too much from the topic, I think there's an unfortunate tendency to get bogged down, either in trying to explain away every plot point or beating you over the head with exposition. I know for me though, the appeal of most sci-fi is the way it captures the imagination. Surely that's half the fun of being a film fan.

This certainly belongs in the "dumb fun" category, although in fairness it does look fun (and dumb, but in the best possible way). I'll probably give it a shot.

As much as they'd probably wish to identify more with the original Solid Snake, deep down I think we all know they're playing as Raiden.

It sounds like this will be arriving as a single, four-hour movie and not a miniseries consisting of four hour-long installments, as was first thought. Somehow, if they're no longer going to be courting the miniseries audience, the project makes even less sense to me. Oddly as well, this thing is still yet to receive a proper release date other than March of this year, so chances are that we're still going to be hearing about it for at least another couple of months.

I whipped through the first four episodes in fairly quick order, but hit a wall with the fifth one and my interest waned a little bit. Thankfully though, it comes back storming towards the end. As a series, it just hits in so many areas and without leaning too hard into cliche.

While the red card would have come as a bit of a surprise to most, in all fairness to Messi, "violent outburst at the end of a cup final against Bilbao" was the only thing missing from his Maradona tribute tryptich.

You'd like to think that this could provide a learning opportunity for other celebrities, or even a realisation that weighing in on topics about which you're almost entirely uninformed perhaps isn't the best idea. It probably won't though.

I think that's a very, very low bar to clear, though. The more I hear about Cyberpunk's development, the more I feel like it was basically just well-orchestrated PR. Now the reality is starting to hit and we realise they're just another large company with many of the same faults that seem endemic throughout the industry. The best one could say at this point (and none of this is on the people who only had artistic control, of course) is that CDPR are known for producing patches and fixing things at a later date but even then, the flipside is that they're not strangers to releasing games in buggy and broken states. Lessons must not have been learned from the release of Witcher 3.

Safe to say they're still going all out with the casting for the Disney+ stuff. While ordinarily, it would feel like a fair bet for Hawke to play Bushman, it's such a grisly character that there's a chance they might just do an "in name only" adaptation.